Tragedy is often the impetus for directing resources at otherwise overlooked, marginalized and peripheral communities. Crisis narratives justify interventions – political, economic and cultural – to save populations from the consequences of natural disasters, military conflicts or climate change. Governments intervene to demonstrate their commitments. Sometimes, in the name of national security, the population to be protected is the domestic majority who are framed as the victims of outside, nefarious forces (i.e. the extrajudicial internment of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in China). At other times, the population to be rescued is a minority group, evidencing a state’s care for its citizenry.
The 2008 Wenshan Earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, was one such tragedy that spurred national concern and interest in a minority community and its cultural practices. The destructive power of the earthquake and ensuing national recovery efforts threw light onto the ethnic Qiang villages near the epicentre, prompting Wen Jiabao, then China’s prime minister, to declare that “the safeguarding of the Qiang ethnic minority was a matter of national importance” (p. 43). In her study of Qiang ethnic identity and China’s multicultural national imaginary, Yanshuo Zhang analyses a wide range of texts, media and genres across historical periods to demonstrate how Qiang engage in what she calls “creative belonging.” Creative belonging, Zhang writes, encompasses “how minority identities are constantly invented and reinvented” through interactions, across time, between national political narratives and minority cultural practices (p. 39).
By examining Qiang identity from multiple viewpoints, beginning with classical Chinese legends and texts such as The Book of Later Han (Hou Han Shu, Fan Ye, 398–445) and ending with a locally researched and published Qiang cultural encyclopedia titled A’er Archive (A’er Dang’an, 2011, collectively produced by the residents of A’er village), Zhang illuminates the resilience of Qiang consciousness within shifting formations of the Chinese nation as well as the pervasiveness of racial and ethnic discourses as a means of calibrating and codifying political legitimacy and social belonging. Multiplicity is key to the study, both in terms of understanding Qiang as an ethnic group and a marker of ethnic difference (vis-à-vis Han Chinese) and as a methodology that recognizes and embraces a diversity of cultural productions and the fluidity of human social relations. Zhang’s commitment to multidisciplinary methods is effective at emphasizing the unruliness of ethnicity as a concept and a lived reality. Individual chapters introduce lesser-known contemporary Qiang authors and films about Qiang cosmology. Chapters one and two analyse classical Chinese texts, including the myth of Da Yu, and examine Qiang as a marker of otherness in ideologies of race and difference. Chapters three and four leap to the contemporary period, exploring the visual construction of Qiang cultural identity in films by Qiang and non-Qiang directors. The final two case study chapters, five and six, deal with gender relations and cultural activism in contemporary Qiang literature and memoirs, with a focus on the impact of tourism, cultural commodification and China’s “secular modernization” on Qiang ethnic consciousness. A brief conclusion reiterates key questions and themes.
The useful introduction provides a discussion of the broader context of the study, situating the book within related scholarship in China studies on premodern and modern literature, the historiography of ethnic relations, and theories of nationalism and multiculturalism. As Zhang explains, the book advances two arguments: first, that minority groups such as the Qiang can engage in processes of “creative belonging” to dominant, majority national communities, but these processes do not necessarily challenge official discourses (chapters one to three). This argument contributes to a growing body of work in contemporary China studies that investigates what kinds of agency are possible in the face of increasing state surveillance, post-reform era jumps in living standards and economic opportunities, and the aftershocks of the country’s ascent to global dominance.
The Qiang have fostered an “entrepreneurial identity that allows them to thrive” (p. 13) while, and this is Zhang’s second argument, they turn to Qiang spiritual beliefs and ritual practices to find and feel stability in the post-reform years (chapters four to six). Here, Zhang’s discussion of documentary films, memoirs and cultural activism involving Qiang community members seeks to contribute to broader conversations in global Indigenous studies. However, the book’s engagement with Indigenous studies and scholarly debates on Indigeneity reveals a reluctance to contend with the history of Indigenous movements as explicitly political as well as cultural. Indeed, Zhang suggests that the term Indigenous is applicable not because of politics but because many ethnic minority groups in China are “engaged in cultural and economic practices akin to those exercised by many indigenous [sic] groups…” (p. 162). It is worth noting that Indigenous is not capitalized in this book, implying that the contemporary politics of the term may not have been fully considered. Although this slippage does not undermine Zhang’s larger focus on the interplay between majority-Han Chinese cultural productions about the Qiang and Qiang language/Qiang produced texts and media, it is a missed opportunity. While Zhang admirably seeks to expand the purview of Indigenous studies through her work, it is also important to ask what Indigenous studies can bring to the study of ethnic groups in China. It raises questions about the desire to invoke a term such as “Indigenous” to describe or classify Qiang (or any other minority) experiences in China, and what further theoretical and comparative questions emerge in doing so.
Creative Belonging opens a space for much-needed dialogue about Indigeneity, ethnicity and belonging, and cultural activism in China today, as well as multidisciplinary methods in China studies. The fundamental question at stake, and one that persists in relevance and urgency is: What does it mean to belong in (and to) China? This book engages with a range of work and texts about Qiang culture and cosmologies, as well as Qiang experiences in contemporary China. Individual chapters could be incorporated into undergraduate courses as case studies, and graduate students would also benefit from exploring and reflecting upon the methods and sources used.
